In my last post I shared that more than 6 in 10 inspected battery installs were rated substandard.
Here’s something most people outside the industry don’t know: in one state, that gets caught before the system is ever switched on.
Victoria is the only place in Australia where every solar and battery installation is independently inspected before it can be connected to the grid. The installer does the work, then a separate Licensed Electrical Inspector checks it and issues a Certificate of Electrical Safety. No certificate, no connection.
It isn’t a sample or an audit after the fact. It’s every system, every time, before power flows.
The rest of the country works differently. In New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and the others, the installer certifies their own work. The only external check is a small percentage of random audits after the system is already running – the Clean Energy Regulator’s national battery program is currently inspecting under 1% of installs.
The defects themselves aren’t unique to any one state. The regulator has said its national results are tracking similar to the state programs. What differs is the timing. In Victoria a problem is found before the system is energised and handed over. Everywhere else, the same install goes live and can sit on the wall for a year or more before anyone looks at it.
There’s a cost to this. The system can’t be switched on until the inspector has signed off, so with inspectors now in high demand, the installer often has to return a second time just to energise it – a further trip and a further fee on an already expensive job. What the customer gets for that is simple: the small share of installs that are genuinely unsafe never get switched on in the first place.
Victoria has run this model since 2018 and reported a 67% drop in serious safety concerns.
I’m not here to say what the rules should be. But it’s worth knowing that whether your install gets a second set of eyes right now depends largely on which side of a state border it’s on.
Next: what you can do about it, wherever you install.